Patients were already blowing through the door when he arrived at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in December 2001 and his colleagues were muttering about the prospect of another summer like the one that fanned the deadly Ash Wednesday fires of 1983.

"I said, 'What do you mean by Ash Wednesday?" said Dr Greenwood, who is South Australia's Australian of the Year for 2016.

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Alarmed by the probability of a major fire breaking out within his 2.4-million-square-kilometre catchment, Dr Greenwood quickly set up a mobile burns unit that could rapidly respond to a crisis.

Just 10 months later, the Bali bombings became its first major test when Dr Greenwood flew to Darwin to attend to dozens of patients arriving from Denpasar with life-threatening burns.

Along with a registrar and nurse, he attended to 45 patients during a marathon 36-hour shift.

"Bali was enormously formative because mass burns disaster incidents in the first world are relatively uncommon," he said.

"So it gave me an insight into how these things had to be managed in order to get the best outcome for every patient and unfortunately to make the decision that some of those patients were so badly injured that to attempt to look after them would mean you were removing resources and other materials from patients who potentially could survive.

"It was a very, very harsh lesson, and it's not a lesson I'll forget."

"I realised there were still a number of patients who had non-survivable injuries, and that broke my heart."

About 50 people die every year in Australia from burns injuries; in India, 500,000.

Their wounds are so large that they cannot be closed in the 28 days that it takes to grow a new skin from grafts, and they die from infections or dehydration.

Dr Greenwood spent the next decade developing an artificial skin that would protect people's wounds from infection and provide a scaffolding for a new skin to grow over, and was cheap enough to be made available in third world countries.

It has been tested in 32 patients with excellent results, including two victims of the recent bushfires at Pine Ridge.

At the same time, he has been developing a bioreactor that is able to multiply by 180 times the amount of skin that can be grown from a skin graft – enough to cover the surface area of a human.

"I devised methods of using two different products in a staged way so we didn't ever have to use skin grafts again."